


First Time For Everything: Touch - Jack

by Criccieth



Series: First Time For Everything [4]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, Pre-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24971212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Criccieth/pseuds/Criccieth
Summary: All relationships have their stages and their first moments. This is one of them.The first time Jack touches Ianto on purpose is at the end of the boy’s first day. It’s been a very long day involving coffee; insults; arguments; Suzie being suspicious; Owen being hostile; Tosh feeling guilty and oh yes – an attempted alien invasion.
Series: First Time For Everything [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693690
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> We've never been given a name for Jack's wife, whose photo we see in "Something Borrowed", so I made up a name for her. Greg (Bishop) is a character from the tie-in novel The Twilight Streets, where he was a Torchwood employee of the 1940s and Jack's lover and the book makes it clear that Jack had genuine feelings for him. Idris (Hopper) was Margaret Blaine's aide in "Boom Town" and turns up in The Twilight Streets, where it emerges that he's partially resistent to retcon.
> 
> Un-beta'd. Con. crit. is always welcome!

The first time Jack touches Ianto on purpose is at the end of the boy’s first day. It’s been a very long day involving coffee; insults; arguments; Suzie being suspicious; Owen being hostile; Tosh feeling guilty and oh yes – an attempted alien invasion. When Ianto brings him a cup of coffee just after 11 that night, Jack slides his hand over the back of the younger man’s. He curls his fingers around Ianto’s wrist, letting them brush across the pulse-point and feels the boy’s heart-rate pick up. The skin is smooth and warm and he’s just wondering what the rest of Ianto’s body feels like under those suits when that soft, deep voice once more murmurs:

“I should go.” And the boy slips away, out of his reach and out of his office. Jones, Ianto Jones is looking set to be a fascinating new toy, that’s for sure and Jack’s looking forward to uncovering every inch.

That, however, is at the end of the day.

Many hours earlier, he leaves Ianto in the kitchen to unravel the mysteries of the coffee-maker and walks up the side of the Armoury to the top of the main stairs. The cog-door is just rolling shut and the other three are coming down the shallow steps to the Hub floor. _Damn_. He’d expected Tosh, of course, but he’d known she’d be immediately engrossed in her work – and when Tosh is engrossed, he could have (in every sense of the word) anyone at all up in his office and Tosh would never notice. The presence of the other two, however, really does put a crimp in his (personal) plans for Ianto.

Owen looks even more of a mess than when he left, dressed in the same rumpled clothes and with his stubble even more pronounced. By contrast, the two women are both freshly-dressed and look far more refreshed than you’d expect on less than 4 hours sleep. Jack wonders briefly how much time Tosh spend in the shower this morning. Her first month out of the UNIT cell, she showered at least twice daily. He’d surprised her in the showers once, in her second week – he hadn’t been trying to come on to her, he’d been responding to an alarm that the system flagged up about unusual power usage (he didn't come onto her until her third month, she turned him down flat and after he'd got over the shock he'd never mentioned it again). She’d been embarrassed, stammering out something about having missed the luxury of a shower and he’d outlined a few of his own experiences (making them sound like undercover cases and blurring some of the details) that had left him with the over-riding need to be **clean**. She’d smiled shyly and he’d left her to it, making a note to ensure they never ran out of shower gel. _General supplies!_ he thinks, already adding to Ianto’s as-yet-undefined list of duties.

Many months from now, he will look back with a gnawing sense of guilt about how quickly that list grew, and how long. Ianto lifted so many of those annoying, fiddly little tasks from his shoulders that he simply gratefully handed over even more of them. Many months from now, he will grimly reflect that it was far too easy to end up thinking of Ianto as barely more than one of the Hub’s (more attractive) physical assets and to forget about the living, breathing human being behind that attractive façade. The fact that this was Ianto’s very intention won’t make him feel any less guilty for it, many months from now.

But today:-

“Morning people!” he calls as he descends the stairs. “Early start?”

Tosh, already half-way to her work-station, gives him a quick, distracted smile of greeting.

“Wanted to get on,” she says, clearly itching to do just that as she dashes over to her station, where Jack did actually remember to turn the scan off as requested when he brought Ianto back through the Hub after showing him the medical suite and upper storage rooms. Jack watches with amusement as she forgets him in favour of new information before she’s even sat down.

He looks at Suzie, who hasn’t even answered him - merely throwing him a vague gesture in reply. She stalks over the floor towards her desk, unwinding a long silk scarf from about her neck and dropping it over the back of her chair. Her eyes are fixed on the foot-long jet black egg-shaped thing on her desk and she opens her top drawer and pulls out the medical-grade gloves stored there.

He supposes that he should have anticipated Suzie being in early. She’s a fine one to lecture him about his ‘obsessions’ (and they’re not obsessions, the only **obsession** he has is the Doctor. He does sometimes get a little... enamoured of particularly pretty potential conquests, but it always ends as soon as they start asking for more than just fantastic sex) - whenever they have anything she even suspects of being a weapon she’s like a terrier: sinks her teeth in and won’t let go. She'll burn the mid-night oil for days on end until she either has all its uses and secrets (all the while pressuring Jack to let her try it out on the range downstairs, although she gave up trying to get him to let her use alien weaponry in the field years ago) or she knows it’s not a weapon – in which case she loses all interest.

They found out about the egg two weeks ago when one of Tosh’s flagging programmes pinged it. Whatever the hell it is, it certainly didn’t belong in the buried remains of the 4th century hut it had been discovered in during the renovations of Swansea Docks. Suzie went over to collect it. When Tosh’s scans could find nothing save that it wasn’t made of any known metal but has a density that matches a precise mixture of…. Jack thinks she said tungsten and iron, Suzie decided it must be a weapon. The fact that she hasn’t managed to crack this thing – in any sense of the word – is bugging her but he knows his Suzie. She won’t turn her attention to anything else now unless he orders it.

But even though he really should have expected Suzie in early, Owen’s appearance is certainly unexpected.

“Morning Owen. Your dedication to duty bring you in early as well?”

Owen is, actually, in his own way dedicated to the job – this team is far safer under Owen’s brusque care than any other Torchwood team in Jack’s memory - but Owen certainly is not in this early because of work. There are only ever three reasons he’s in the Hub before nine: he didn’t manage to leave; Jack called the team in early; or he’s spent the night in someone else’s bed. Today it’s certainly not either of the first two and as even the most enthusiastic of Cardiff’s nightclubs is closed by the time Jack sent them all home last night, there’s only one ‘someone else’ Owen is likely to have been with. Jack hides a grimace, hoping pointlessly that Tosh will somehow fail to put two and two together. Willing participation assumed, he doesn’t care who **any** of his team sleep with, but Tosh - for reasons best known only to herself - is smitten with Owen. Why she doesn’t make a play for him is also for reasons only she knows. The 21st century is still frustratingly repressed in a lot of ways and he’s not sure what term best suits the on-again/off-again thing between his medic and his second-in-command (‘colleagues-with-benefits’?); but whatever it is, he’s sure neither of them has any expectations of monogamy – and he’s equally sure it’s not the sort of thing that involves Suzie creeping quietly out of her own flat to let Owen sleep undisturbed. So why doesn’t Tosh just make a move on Owen?

He's also not sure why Suzie and Owen seem to think that just because he and Tosh haven’t come across them screwing, they don’t know what’s going on. Tosh is always even more quiet than normal when she can see the other two are in their on-again phase. As for himself, he always knows everything that happens in his Hub and to the people in it. **Everything.** And he **always** knows when two of his team are screwing each other.

It’s hardly surprising that for pretty much as long as there’s been a team in the Hub, at least two of its members have been fucking each other (in the 1920s, they were **all** fucking each other, often at the same time, but that was the 20s for you). With the lives they lead, they need some form of stress-relief and this is Torchwood - which pretty much guarantees that any relationship with outsiders will fail sooner or later. Grabbing onto contact with the only other people who can remotely understand their lives is entirely understandable. It’s also a claustrophobic, almost incestuous pattern; with the relationships invariably burning themselves out within a few months at best, being built on little more than adrenalin with a bit of sexual attraction thrown in (the only one that lasted was, bizarrely enough, Guppy and Holroyd, who were mongamous to the end). Jack has had his own share of these internal flings - and hopefully that share that will soon include one Ianto Jones - but as Suzie made it crystal clear that they were a one-time thing and neither Tosh nor Owen have ever been remotely interested, he’s been going elsewhere since the Millennium. The clubs or the streets when all he wants is sex, and short-term flings when he wants the human contact. He doesn’t do love – he’s tried it three times since the Game Station (Hannah, Greg and Estelle) and it never works. He and Lucia were never in love - the only remotely good thing that came out of that whole debacle was their daughter and look how that ended up. Since then, he’s only gone for the short-term. As soon as his partners start wanting more, he’s gone. It’s not fair on them to hang around when they start wanting something he’s not prepared to give.

Now he watches as Owen just snarls wordlessly, stumbling to his desk and dropping heavily into his chair before dropping his head onto his folded arms. Despite appearances, he’s not drunk – for all he’s still losing himself in the bottle or sex most nights, he hasn’t turned up drunk during normal working hours since his second week and Jack’s threat that if it ever happened again, he’d be retconned back to before Katie has prevented a repetition. To be completely fair to Owen, that one occurrence happened after a six-year-old boy fell victim to the same species of alien that had killed her. Owen, who ‘til then had spent his first ten days glued to the Hub’s medical records, had gone to the hospital along with Jack; done everything Jack asked of him (including helping to plant the evidence at the hospital and the cover-story in the minds of the grieving parents) and brought the child back to the Hub (carrying the tiny body from the SUV himself) for the autopsy. Then he’d stored all the evidence, submitted his report, and walked out of the Hub straight into a three-day-bender that by his own later recollection involved starting nine brawls and sleeping with thirteen different women and three different men. When he finally staggered back to the Hub, he was so drunk he could scarcely stand never mind work. It was why they’d had to send Tosh to the previously-arranged meeting at with UNIT and Torchwood One's representative, because trying to delay it would just have given Hartman the excuse she wanted to interfere in the workings of the Hub. And because Jack knew he couldn't, mustn't, go himself.

(If he ever hears another comment about his impetuousness when he does finally catch up with the right Doctor at the right time [soon, it will be soon. It has to be soon – doesn’t it?] then he’s gonna point to 1942, the space-pig **and** the Blaidd Dwrg incidents as proof that he can, when the situation calls for it, operate self-restraint. If he’d gone with his heart in 1942, or with his initial reaction when the date for the Slitheen attack approached, he’d have gone to London - and screwed up the time-line. But although you can take the man out of the Time Agency, you can’t take the Time Agency out of the man and he has too much training to play fast and loose with time. Six months later, it had taken another massive effort of will [and much forward planning] to get the Hub into the apparently accidental lock-down that prevented any interaction between his own team and the TARDIS crew. Then he had to get Tosh to help him cover up all the evidence about the Doctor before One got onto it before wiping her memory of doing so. He likes using Retcon on his team even less than he likes using it on the public but he didn’t really have a choice. He’d left the mysterious disappearance of the Mayor to the public rumour-mill and the general theory is that, under cover of the earthquake she ran off to Parts Unknown with the public money intended for the power station. Which isn’t entirely incorrect - she really **had** been running a financial scam on the side, although it was more to hide the deliberate safety shortcomings than anything else. Suspecting something of the kind at the time [he might have left his con-man days behind when he boarded the TARDIS, but he's **always** known a con when he sees one], Jack had gone digging around once his younger self was out of the picture. The money is now safely in various hidden accounts, letting him fund those side-projects One never knew about like Flat Holm and the Rift-refugee resettlements.)

Now he crosses to stand over Owen, who lifts his head an inch from his arms to glare up at him.

“God, Jack, stop bloody looming and get me some coffee will you?!”

“Coffee?” Jack starts to grin.

“Yeah, coffee.” Owen looks at the pile of paperwork and other clutter on his desk. “I can’t face work this early in the morning without coffee.”

“You can’t face work at any time, with or without coffee.” Suzie calls absently, not looking up from the egg. Jack’s grin broadens as Owen flips two fingers at Suzie. Tosh is the only one who tries to pander to Owen’s temper – he and Suzie usually deal with him by simply ignoring his moods and carrying on.

“What work **are** you planning on facing today?” The question is so unusual that Owen stares at him open-mouthed and his words even penetrate the fog of concentration around the other two. Jack glances over to find both of them staring at him. He never asks what they plan to work on – his management style revolves more around letting them go their own way until he needs their talents in one particular place and time and then expecting them to comply instantly without argument and drop everything else, including any work previously handed out. It seems to be working so far.

He looks back down at Owen, still sitting in his chair staring at Jack like he’s grown an extra head. Well, not quite like that, if memory serves, but not far off.

“Owen? What’s the plan for today – after coffee?”

“Uhh…I…” Own blinks, then starts to speak, his words becoming brisker and more business-like as he talks. “There’s two autopsies need doing: that poor bastard we found round the back of Queen Street station and the Weevil that Dwr Cymru pulled out the storm drain.” He pronounces it ‘do come-ree’ and it occurs to Jack that as far as he knows Ianto will be the first Torchwood employee in Wales who actually speaks the language. Back in Guppy’s day the hiring policy was emphatically **against** employing locals and although that changed briefly in the 1940s, Alex had the same attitude as Guppy towards the locals and One never regarded it’s Welsh off-shoot as anything other than a country cousin. For a moment, he hears again the real bitterness in Blon Fel-Fotch’s voice when she said _London doesn’t care. South Wales could fall into the sea and they wouldn’t notice_ and then the note of surprise in her voice _Oh God help me, I’ve gone native!_ He hadn’t understood, then.

Owen glances at the clock on his monitor. “That scan I left running on the paramedic’s brain should finish by 10, so we’ll know what the hell the poor sod got hit by last night, and there’s the report on that gloop that got found in the changing rooms at the school.” He shrugs. “Though I still swear it’s just a twenty-five-year build-up of school-kid dirt and sweat from the pipes.”

“So how did it eat through the wall and attack the P.E. teacher?” Jack asks.

Owen shrugs. “Kids today, who knows what shit they take, smoke or inject. Then the Rift on top of that…”

“So you think this is **high** twenty-five-year-old dirt hit by Rift energy?” Jack realises he’s half a step from wondering if Owen may have something. That’s what 100+ years of living and working on top of the Rift does to you: you start to realise that absolutely anything and everything could be possible. He shakes his head, making himself dismiss the notion and puts on his “The Boss” voice.

“Any room in that schedule for checking the SUV supplies?”

Owen scowls. “And that’s my job why? I told you last night Jack, I’m a doctor not a bleedin’ nurse. We all use the fucking stuff, the person who uses the last bit should refill it.”

Jack feels a spark of anger but tamps it down. His aim right now is to lead into the benefits of the new hire, not to get pissed off with Owen’s inclination to be lazy. “For a start, because I told you when you started that you were responsible for all things medical and the way I see it, that includes medical supplies. Not to mention, you were the last one to use any Retcon.” He glances up and around, because the two women are still watching. “Unless anyone’s been using Retcon without asking me first?”

If the Doctor does challenge him on the whole issue, the fact that he keeps the retconning to a level lower than Torchwood One would ever have tolerated will be his main defence. Retcon is only administered with his direct knowledge and approval and he only gives that when he judges it necessary. One of the first things he did when the Hub came into his hands was to adjust the chemical make-up just enough. **His** Torchwood no longer erases whole swathes of memory - he favours removing only the vital minutes or the specific thread of memory, so the target loses what he needs them to forget but retains everything around that loss. And on those rare occasions when people like Idris either regain their memories or turn out to be immune, he keeps them under surveillance for a while before deciding what to do next. Before he took over, memory recovery or immunity meant a death sentence at worst, a second retconning at best. He’s seen what happens when someone gets too much Retcon too quickly, and it’s not a pretty sight what with the drooling and the mindless raving. So, surveillance. In the dead of night he realises that it doesn’t entirely appease his conscience, but it’s the best he can do. Whether the Doctor will see it that way or not…

“Well?” he says, pushing that train of thought away and they all shake their heads. He looks back at the medic. “I came up short yesterday and believe me when I say that’s not something that happens very often. Now as I recall, you were the last to use Retcon before yesterday…”

“Eh?” Owen says, frowning.

“You called back to the Hub and got my approval for six doses last Friday, remember?” Jack says impatiently. “After the taxi-crash made the Schtuli driver metamorphose in front of a cab full of clubbers.” Doesn’t matter how drunk you are, the sight of a five-foot-six Oriental man turning into an asexual eight-foot long, six-foot-high purple quadruped with something a bit like a horse’s head and a vocal range in the subsonics is gonna be memorable. E’rad’ert had been very apologetic at the time, and had even offered to buy them all drinks the next time they meet in the ‘Eli Jenkins’. Jack was just thankful there hadn’t been another car involved in the crash.

“Oh yeah, I remember that,” Owen says, his tone making it fairly clear what he found memorable. “One of those girls was a looker…” He looks up and catches Jack’s expression and holds out both hands in a ‘you got me’ gesture. “Hey, all I did was shove a piece of paper with my mobile number into her pocket. How many times do you wake up from a good night out and find you’ve picked up a number you don’t recognise? I figured, she either took a chance and called it or she didn’t.” His gaze goes over Jack’s shoulder to Suzie and whatever he sees there makes him scowl. “Way I see it, no harm, no foul.” His gaze comes back to Jack. “But I could’ve sworn when I took the bottle out there was one more dose left.”

“Did you actually check, or just take six out?”

Owen throws up both hands in a placating gesture.

“Ok, ok! I could’ve sworn I left one in the bottle….”

“Right,” Jack continues. “So why didn’t you fill the bottle back up?”

“Christ Jack, by the time I got back here that night it was three a.m.! You were insisting on that report on the Nostrovite being finished in case some poor sod was out there already impregnated – I didn’t get out of here till nearly five and it must have slipped my mind to dig some more retcon out and go back to the bloody SUV. Got enough on my fucking plate, ain’t I?" He shrugs, scratching at his bristly cheek. "Anyway, I brought some out to the reservoir when we needed it, so….”

“Depleting the Hub stocks while you were at it.”

“Eh?” Owen stares at him. “No I di…..are you sure?”

Jack huffs. “Yes, I’m sure. Our sum stocks are the two bottles you brought with you yesterday. Tell me Owen, do you ever check any supplies outside the level of Nescafe?”

“Look,” Owen snarls, mouth thinning even more than usual. “It sounded like the reservoir thing might go south on us anytime and you wanted the bloody retcon didn’t you? So I didn’t exactly stop to count the bottles – thought I saw an extra bottle at the back of the safe…”

“Oh, you mean this one?” Jack dips his hand into his pocket to extract the empty bottle he’d found when he searched the medical safe after settling the new resident. “I know we’re supposed to be more security-conscious these days Owen, but locking up an empty bottle?”

Owen throws one puzzled glance at the bottle and then glares at Jack. “Fine! I’ll add making more fucking retcon to the list, ok?”

Jack nods once and tosses him the bottle, then turns to Tosh, who’s gone back to her work.

“Tosh!” He claps his hands together, drawing her attention and Suzie’s. Owen, always happy to have an excuse not to start work, is still looking at him. “What’s on your agenda today?”

She’s clearly still surprised at his question but she answers nonetheless.

“Err.. go through the scan results, see if it’s managed to make anything of that box we pulled from the crash-site at Cadoxton, take a decent look at that gemstone the Rift dropped in St Mary’s Street last week and then there’s the hieroglyphics from the reservoir case.”

Jack nods. “Did you get far with them last night?”

She shakes her head, grimacing. “I tried running it through the translator programme but I got nothing but gibberish – I really need to go over that programme again, but..” She shrugs. They all have projects they’d love to have the time to carry out, but spare time is a rare luxury here. “There was a sketch in the paper file of the ones from last time, which I added in when running the translation but I don't know if they were accurate sketches without seeing the original. The rest of the file will tell me if there was any kind of translation tried then, and who knows what else might be in it. If you could let me take the original out of the Secure Archives….”

“You’re **sure** there’s nothing in the main archives that could help?” Jack asks. His reluctance isn’t faked – there is tech and weapons and equipment down in the deep levels there that are even more dangerous than what lies in the main archives. Some of it he knows he will have to release at the appropriate moments so that history will go down the right paths, but by and large he encourages them to forget about the very existence of the Secure Archives - he really doesn’t want anyone with the intelligence level and sheer need to **know** that all his team possess to think too much about what’s down there.

Tosh throws up her hands in exasperation at the repetition of last night’s question.

“No! Like I said Jack – I **don’t** know but we exhausted the digital files and we’ve both…” she nods over his shoulder towards Suzie, “had a quick look in the most likely places downstairs and can’t find anything. So unless you want us to spend the next month down in the archives, we **can’t** know for sure.”

“We need your talents elsewhere Tosh.” He waits a beat, then puts on a casual attitude. “The archives really holding you up that much?”

“Yes,” she says, so quickly the word is out almost before he’s finished speaking. “I dread to think how many hours I spend down there trying to find things.” She leans forward slightly over her desk preparatory to going into one of her favourite topics. She’s spoken about this often in the three years since he brought her here. As a matter of fact, they’ve all been telling him the Archives need sorting out (and he’s been agreeing with them) pretty much since their respective first weeks. Well, it took Tosh four hours; but her first comment was via e-mail: she barely opened her mouth for her first six weeks. They all agree on the problem, but it’s finding the time to do something about it that has been the reason it’s got worse. And now he has the solution on a plate.

For a moment, the mental image that **that** thought drags up distracts him in a very pleasant way and then he pushes it away for later and concentrates on the team.

“What would you want from the Archives, if we can find the time?” he asks. She looks surprised but answers eagerly.

“A detailed electronic tagging system, so we can search under any number of characteristics. The artefacts themselves all recorded into a new, improved, coding system so we can find anything we want straight away – like the Dewey decimal system.” At his confused blink, she sighs. “Like they use in libraries, Jack! And that should be cross-referenced with the case files, the autopsies and medical reports. And everything down there should be scanned onto Mainframe as standard, instead of doing it ad hoc. We need to over-haul the online archives as well. Everything’s a mess Jack, and it’s getting worse.”

“Be a full-time fucking job, getting that mess into order” Owen mutters from his desk.

“I don’t see you helping matters, Owen,” Jack answers, though in reality this conversation is giving him exactly what he wants. “When was the last time you filed an autopsy under anything other than ‘Au’?”

Owen glares at him again, though now there’s more exasperation than anger there. “Well since we don’t know the species name half the time, where’d you want me to file ‘em? Take that thing we pulled from the Bay last week – under ‘T’ for tentacles? ‘S’ for slimy? ‘C’ for cold-blooded? Never be able to find a file again if I put them anywhere else. At least this way they’re all together – and at least I date ‘em and flag them for where they were found.” He starts to smirk. “And you’re just as bad – how many incident reports are filed under ‘I’? Or ‘S’ if you think it involved something sexy?”

“Hey, I use ‘H’ as well!” Jack says and Susie snorts.

“Don’t tell me – ‘hot’?”

Jack grins and winks at her as Owen smirks.

He turns to look at Tosh. "Yes, alright, I’ll get you the file from the Secure Archives. IM me with the case reference and I’ll get as soon as I can. But I’ve four situation reports to complete; the damn PM’s been mentioning us to the Leader of the Opposition again – you know, I blame Harriet Jones: before her, no PM had ever even heard of us – and thanks to her also keeping the Cabinet informed about us, Defence Minister Saxon wants to know when he can have my assessment of the specs for this _Valiant_ thing he’s wanting.” He doesn’t really want to have that conversation. Saxon is easy enough on the eye, God knows, but he won’t even have that pleasure during a phone conversation - and for some reason his conversations with Saxon always leave him with a headache.

“Suzie!” He turns his head to look at her and she meets his gaze and holds it.

“Jack,” she says crisply.

“What’s the excitement today then?”

She shrugs, indicating the egg-shaped item on her desk. “This, unless you or the Rift throw something else at me. And I’d back up Tosh.” She gives Tosh a quick smile. They’re not exactly friends – both too inclined to get absorbed in their work to really notice anything as mundane as other people – but they unite occasionally against Owen’s worst sulks and his own tendency to try to solve problematic aliens first and foremost by flirting with them. “The Archives need an overhaul. I’m sure I’ve seen a reference to something like this in the archives, but I spent most of yesterday trying to find it and - ” she shakes her head.

Tosh leans forward again, her expression becoming intent. “The problem is that if you don’t already know what you’re looking for…”

“You’re fucked six ways from Sunday” Owen finishes. A flash of disdain crosses Tosh’s face, but she nods in agreement as quickly as Suzie does.

Jack claps both hands together, grins round at them and points up to the Boardroom.

“Meeting guy and gals – up in the Boardroom. Got something to tell you.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, we’re here, can’t you just….”

“Jack, I want to get on with….”

“No way am I going any further today without some bloody coffee….”

All three voices are raised in protest at the same time, but now force of personality comes into play and of course he’s chosen his team well. Not one of them is a walkover (anyone who thinks Tosh is all milk-and-water has never seen her on a mission) but none of them can stand up to him when he’s determined to get his own way. He ushers them all up the stairs and into the Boardroom.

“Back in a second.” He grins. “Coffee!” He leaves them there, ignoring the cries of protest at being dragged to the Boardroom and then abandoned, and heads back around to the kitchen. By his estimate he’s been gone no more than fifteen minutes. He stops short one step inside the kitchen, staring around in amazement.

With the exception of the worktop nearest the sink, all the kitchen surfaces are clean and clear. There are two bulging binbags sitting tied closed on the kitchen floor and a third is sitting in the bin, half-full of disposable crockery and cutlery. The smell of hot water and cheap washing-up liquid is in the air and steam is rising slowly from the sink, which is full of frothy water and a large number of the washable cups and plates that were scattered about the kitchen surfaces. More sit, clean and gleaming wetly, on the draining board while a third lot, still dirty, is piled neatly near the sink. On the edge of the worktop closest to the door there is a notepad and pen and on twisting his head Jack can see a list in a neat, precise hand.

Washing up liquid

Cloths

Bleach

Multi-surface cleaner

Tea towels

Bin bags

Air freshener

New mop/bucket?

Biscuits

Coffee

Filter papers

Syrups/toppings

Milk

Cream

Sugar/sweetener

Tea?

He looks up to find Ianto looking at him questioningly from where he stands in front of the coffee maker, which is set up on the worktop and seems to be busily doing **something.**

“Sir?”

Jack indicates the small room with a sweep of one hand. “I’m impressed. You always work this fast or are you showing off?”

Ianto glances around the room and then back at Jack. “I believe, Captain, I offered to prove myself to you.” He is totally deadpan but Jack grins, because he’s starting to love the way every word Ianto utters seems able to be read in two different ways.

“Oh, I intend to give you every chance to prove yourself, Ianto.”

Ianto gives him that tiny curve of the lips again as he answers. “Delighted to hear it, sir.”

Jack is just about to close the small distance between to progress this line of conversation when Ianto speaks again.

“Will you be wanting those coffees now? Everything seems to be ready.”

That brings Jack back to the initial reason he came back to the kitchen and he nods, starting to turn away. “Bring them right along to the Boardroom.”

He heads back to the Boardroom, feeling a surge of the same frustration he felt when the others arrived. He starts to wonder if he can get rid of the rest of the team early tonight, if the Rift doesn’t throw up too much trouble. He can call it induction training. Of course, he’ll need to see what Ianto’s firearms skills are like too, and he gives a small hum of pleasure at the thought. He trains everyone in the same way (his argument is that they need to show they can shoot straight under pressure), although he was emphatically clear to Tosh that he was simply acting as a distraction. Owen threatened to kick him in the bollocks after just 5 seconds, while Suzie seemed not to even notice. But the idea of running through his normal training programme with Ianto… moulding himself to that long frame, after the signals Ianto has been giving him….. he thinks they might just have a very **very** good time.

When he returns to the Boardroom, where the other three are all sitting round the large table looking impatient, he walks straight to the Mainframe terminal they keep in here. Rift alerts automatically flag to all their phones but that's not all their work. Tosh’s scans cover internet traffic and searches; listen in on the military bandwidth over at St Athan and the emergency services radio systems; monitor all 999 calls; calls to the local radio stations; the emergency reporting number for the Environment Agency Wales and even the bandwidths for the bus company and Cardiff’s three biggest taxi firms. It would be a huge task for any contemporary computer system but it uses only a small corner of Mainframe’s semi-organic mind. The system then highlights anything that has Tosh’s programmed flags in them and drops the rest of the calls, but of necessity the flags are broad: it will flag a 999 call to police reporting ‘skinheads’ or ‘yobs’, as the risk of it turning out to mean Weevils is too high to ignore, even if more often than not it isn’t. Someone then has to go through the highlighted calls manually – something they try and do in as near to real-time as possible. It’s one of those essential, boring jobs and whoever is manning the Tourist Office is always given the task of carrying it out on the terminal in the back-room up there to relieve the others of the necessity. Ianto could certainly handle it and it occurs to Jack that they can divert the logged calls to a PDA so he isn’t tied to a terminal to carry it out.

Glancing quickly over the details of the twenty calls made since he last checked a few minutes before Ianto arrived, Jack reckons there are only two that might really be something and neither of them require an immediate response. He recognises the address matching to the shimmering bipedal shapes seen on a roof in Dunvant. He’ll have to get onto Bell and Chandler and remind them that he only ignores their illegal activities as long as they keep their heads down and their occasional info on the alien side of Cardiff’s underworld is good – frightening the locals by forgetting to keep up their disguises just gets him pissed off. The report of the body found near the Castle less than an hour ago needs a more immediate follow-up, though. Whatever 999 call brought the ambulance out didn’t get flagged, but the call from the paramedics back to base include the words “bite marks” and “dogs” and the cause of death suggested by the paramedic is “poor bastard had his throat ripped out”. They’ll need to get the body back here for Owen to do the autopsy but the whole thing screams Weevil. If it was the middle of the night, he’d be sending someone out to check it now just in case but by-and-large the streets of Cardiff are Weevil-free during the daylight hours.

“Jack!” Suzie’s voice is sharp enough to make him look up and he finds himself being glared at by both Owen and Susie while even Tosh looks impatient.

“C’mon, you want to tell us what the hell you dragged us all up here for?” Owen is slumped back in his chair, hands behind his head.

Jack grins just as footsteps sound outside the Boardroom. The soft noise of the door opening makes the other turns their heads.

“Coffee” Jack says, as Ianto walks in.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team meet the newest member - and not everyone is happy about it.

Owen’s mouth drops open as Ianto moves smoothly towards the table, the surface of the four almost-brim-full mugs on the tray in his hands barely rippling. As it gets down softly on the table, Jack has time to think _We have a tray?_ before Owen speaks, lip curled in a sneer.

“Fucking hell, I thought you said you didn’t bring one-nighters down here?” He turns a contemptuous look first on Ianto, who has taken a step back to stand with his hands folded in front of him, and then on Jack. “Should’ve known what you wanted the retcon for! Mind, getting the latest one to make you coffee before getting rid of him is a bit much, even for you!”

“You’ve got the wrong idea…” Jack starts to say but Owen throws a second, even more contemptuous look at Ianto as he continues.

“So what **did** you do then? Find a gentleman’s club that offers that something ‘extra’? Or did you go the Pretty Woman route?” Jack winces inside even as Suzie gives a sharp snort of derisive laughter and Tosh’s eyes widen as she grasps Owen’s meaning. He’d known Suzie and Owen would make assumptions about exactly **what** Ianto had been hired for (it’s only last week that Owen told him he was nothing more than a sex-drive on legs and Suzie agreed), but he hadn’t expected this. For his part, Ianto doesn’t seem to be at all fazed by a new colleague implying he’s either a one-night-stand, an escort or a rent-boy – and Jack reflects for a second that if Owen had seen how Ianto was dressed two nights ago he’d probably never be able to convince the other man that that last **wasn’t** the case.

“Ianto Jones,” Jack says firmly. “Meet Doctor Owen Harper, our medic; Suzie Costello, weapons specialist and my second-in-command - and Toshiko Sato, our technical expert. Gang – meet Ianto Jones, our new General Support Officer.” He literally makes up the title as it comes out of his mouth. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ianto glance at him and then back at his new team-mates.

“You what?” Owen stares first at Jack, then at Ianto and back again.

“What the hell?” Suzie says, no trace of amusement in her voice now.

“Oh!” There’s blank surprise in Tosh’s voice. Ianto steps forward again, lifts the first cup from the tray and holds it out to her.

“Ms Sato,” he says with the polite, empty smile of a barista.

“Oh!” she says again. She glances at Jack, who nods at her, then looks back at Ianto. She gives him one of her shy smiles and reaches out to take the mug. “Thank you. Um – pleased to meet you, Ianto.” She echoes Jack’s pronunciation of the very Welsh name as she puts the mug down. The hand she now offers him almost disappears inside his much larger one as they briefly shake.

“Likewise, Ms Sato.”

“Please, call me Tosh.”

He gives her another smile exactly like the first and then takes another mug from the tray and offers it to Suzie.

“Ms Costello.” Suzie is frowning, an odd look on her face. She takes the mug without a word, watching him intently and doesn’t offer a handshake. He doesn’t seem to notice but turns his attention back to the tray and offers the third mug to Owen, who is still glaring at Jack.

“Dr Harper,” Ianto says but Owen doesn’t look at him or take the mug and after a moment Ianto places it in front of him.

“What the fuck are you thinking of, Harkness?” Owen snaps. He only uses that name if he’s admiring Jack or pissed at him and it’s pretty obvious which one it is right now.

“What d’you mean?” He lets his gaze go from Owen to Ianto as their new team-member lifts the last mug – a blue-and-white striped one that Jack hasn’t seen in at least a fortnight – and holds it out to him,

“Captain,” he says softly. Jack reaches out to the mug and as soon as his fingers curl around the hot ceramic, Ianto’s own hand slides disappointingly away. He picks up the now-empty tray and steps back, the tray flat against his leg. Jack lifts the mug up, inhaling the aroma. As he does, he sees Tosh take a small sip from her mug and her eyebrows shoot up, her eyes widening slightly. It's the sort of look she gives him when he’s just found her a new toy or puzzle to figure out. The ‘who, me? This is for me?’ look. Unless he’s sadly mistaken (and Jack Harkness is never mistaken), Ianto has just won Tosh over as well.

“What do I mean?” Owen snaps, right hand clenching briefly into a fist. “I mean, when the hell did you decide to add to the team? Why is he here? Who the hell is he? Where the fuck did he come from?” As he raps out each question, he uncurls a finger. “And what the bloody hell is he going to be doing around here?”

Jack leans back in his seat, lifting his mug again. Suzie has lifted her own but she merely sniffs it carefully, not drinking. Jack grins at her and purposefully takes a long gulp. It tastes just as heavenly as it did yesterday. And just like yesterday, it will be months before it occurs to him to wonder how Ianto knew from the first just how they all take their coffee.

“When did I decide?” He looks over at Ianto. “About two-thirty this morning, wasn’t it?”

Ianto blinks once before he answers. “I would say around then, yes sir,” Jack sees Suzie’s eyes widen a little and once again winces inwardly, realising what he’s just made it sound like. _Great move, Harkness! Just confirm their suspicions why don’t you?_

“I decided,” he says firmly. “That the Hub could use his skills after he helped me corner a pterodactyl.” Of course, it wasn’t the benefits to the Hub he was thinking of at the time, but there’s no way he’s going to admit that. It's a good job he can still lie outrageously with a straight face.

“A what?” Suzie stares at him. Ianto coughs softly.

“Having considered the matter, I believe she’s a Pteranodon, sir. No teeth.” _How the hell does he know that?_ Jack thinks to himself in some bemusement. But all he says is:

“Huh,” and takes another mouthful of coffee. The other three are all staring at him, Tosh’s mug briefly forgotten in her hand. Jack gives them a questioning look.

“Why did a Pteranodon…” Tosh starts to say and Jack cuts in.

“It came through the Rift.” Even as he says it, he realises he still hasn’t asked Ianto how he knew the creature was in the damn warehouse. Wasn’t there a Rift surge out there yesterday morning? Yet he’s sure Owen and Tosh said the only result was that transformer.

“Where is it now?” Suzie asks, sharply interested. She glances from Jack to Tosh and then lifts her mug and takes a small sip. She frowns very slightly and her gaze returns to Ianto and stays there.

“Up on the ledge, sleeping.” Jack says. “It woke up, we fed it some Weevil rations, it went back to sleep.”

“What the hell are we going to do with a fucking dinosaur?” Owen asks. Jack shrugs.

“I haven’t decided yet. But there’s plenty of room here for it to fly around.”

Owen stares at him in disbelief. “Fly around? Who’s gonna look after it? Stop it from ripping hell out of the Hub? Make sure it doesn’t shit all over the equipment?” Jack grins, taking another mouthful of coffee, and indicates Ianto.

“He will.” Again, Ianto gives him a quick glance before returning his attention to the team. Jack tips his chair back onto its rear legs, keeping it balanced just on the point of toppling over – the very image of the relaxed, nonchalant boss.

“What was the next question? Why is he here? He’s here because I decided we needed the extra hands. Who is he and were does he come from?” OK, this one has the potential for being nasty but it’s best if they get it out of the way sooner rather than later. He takes another swallow of coffee to further the casual, it-hardly-matters, attitude. “He was a Junior Researcher with One.”

“The **fuck?** ”

“ **What**?” Suzie’s gaze snaps across to Jack, her eyes suddenly blazing. Her mug slams back onto the cluttered table-top so hard that some slops down the side of the mug and onto the stained surface. Tosh looks from Owen to Suzie to Ianto to Jack, her own eyes watchful, her face tense.

“ **One**?” Suzie snaps. “What about all that stuff you said where it’d be a cold day in Hell before you let anyone from London in here?”

“What I said,” Jack says, aware that his hands have tightened around the mug. “Was that Hell would freeze over before I handed the Hub over to anyone from London. And I’m not handing the Hub over. Ianto will be answerable to all of us.”

“Oh, you’re just suddenly hiring One’s fall-out now?” Owen snaps. “And what’s he going to do?” He throws a scornful look at Ianto. “I mean, besides model Saville Row?” Ianto glances down at himself, and there’s a flicker of bemusement on his face. Despite the tension in the air, Jack finds himself briefly holding back a smile. The suit is nice, but it’s certainly not Savile Row. He looks over at the two women. Tosh’s gaze is still darting from one to the other of them while Suzie’s lips have thinned over her teeth, her eyes still furious.

“What’s he going to do….” Jack says slowly, making a statement from Owen’s question. He is not going to let Owen tantrum about this, and he’s not going to let Suzie’s silent rage affect him. He’s made his decision. He shrugs casually. “As well as looking after the new pet, shall we say picking up the slack? All those niggling little details that no-one has time to deal with. Like, oh I don’t know:…” He gestures around at the clutter in the room. “Tidying up….” He points at Owen. “….Keeping the medical supplies up-to-date….” He indicates Tosh. “…Creating an Archive tagging system…” Now he points at Suzie. “…Tidying up the Archives…” Now he hitches a thumb towards his own chest. “…And taking care of the paperwork. In short -” and now he looks over at Ianto and speaks directly to him, finally voicing the idea that crystallised just after Tosh rang. “Look after Torchwood, look after the Archives.”

Ianto nods once and Jack grins and drains the mug, keeping his eyes on Ianto who has again returned his attention to his new colleagues.

“The Archives? You’re going to let someone from **One** loose in the Archives?” Owen’s voice brings Jack’s gaze back to him and for a moment they stare at each other before Owen shakes his head, disbelief warring with anger clear on his face. “God, Jack, do you **ever** think with your other hea…”

The front legs of Jack’s chair hit the floor at the same moment his mug and left hand hit the table. Tosh, Owen and Suzie all start in surprise and Ianto’s head jerks round fractionally as he shoots one rapid look at Jack before returning to his previous stance. Jack locks his gaze onto Owen, ignoring the fact that not only is the abrasive doctor entirely correct about what part of Jack made his latest hiring decision but that Ianto himself was clearly concerned about the same thing not an hour ago. At least now Jack can point to something approximating a legitimate job description.

“ **Enough,** Owen! He **was** Torchwood One. He’s **now** Torchwood Three. I made that decision. If you have a problem with that, you bring it to me. In private. Understand?”

There is a brief pause and Owen stares back at him, clearly unwilling to back down but Jack won’t break the gaze because otherwise Owen will see it as winning. He’s just beginning to wonder how long this will go on for when Tosh speaks in the slightly hesitant tone she always uses when she’s intervening between the male half of Torchwood.

“What exactly **was** your role in London, Ianto?”

Her words give Owen an excuse to shoot a glance at her, allowing him to save face even as he acknowledges Jack as the victor once again. He wonders whether Owen has ever figured out that’s exactly the reason Tosh does this sort of thing.

“My first research position was in Linguistics, Ms Sato.” Ianto says, his voice smooth and calm. “Analysing suspected intra- and inter-species communications in all media.” Tosh’s eyes start to sparkle with interest.

“So where did you go after that? And please – it’s Tosh.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack sees Owen take a sip from his own mug and sees him glance down into the dark liquid with clear surprise.

Ianto gives another of those polite smiles. “Yes Ms... Tosh. After six months I was offered a promotion into the Historical Research team.”

There’s a momentary pause as they wait for him to go and when he doesn’t seem inclined to continue it’s Suzie who asks the next question, a clear note of impatience in her voice.

“Which involved what?”

His gaze switches to her. “On-going analysis of our records to ensure that all links between cases were apparent, Ms Costello. For example, following the Slitheen Incursion of 2006 it became possible to identify their role in four earlier cases of trading in alien artefacts.” Which is news to Jack – but then, One were always very secretive.

“Any other roles?” Suzie asks. Her tone is sharply questioning and her mouth is still thin with anger.

“Last December I took a position in the Artefact Investigations team,” Ianto says. Suzie makes an impatient gesture and he continues. “We categorised all overt physical facts about items retrieved before they were handed to the labs for detailed study.”

“Meaning,” Jack says, as though he’d known all this already, “that he’s got a pool of experience to use.”

Owen draws a breath as though to speak but Suzie suddenly leans forward, putting her mug down on the table with a solid _clunk._

“I’ve seen you before, Jones. I recognise you. Where have I seen you before, **Mr.** Jones?” There is an edge to the title that has Jack biting his lower lip for a second. He’d known Owen might carp at Ianto but he’s been assuming Suzie will keep any complaints for Jack’s ears.

Ianto blinks once, then frowns in apparent thought before he gives a brief nod. “Ianto, please, Ms Costello. That would be London. I believe we may have been in the field kitchen at the same time the day after you arrived on-site.”

“You were on the clean-up?” Suzie sits up slightly, looking interested.

“Yes Ma’am.” There’s suddenly a certain rigidity in Ianto’s voice. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack sees Owen mouth ‘Ma’am?’ to himself with a look of disbelief. Tosh gives the faintest of smiles but Suzie’s expression doesn’t change by a hair. “Everyone except those admitted to hospital was ordered to take part in the recovery operation,” Ianto continues. Suzie leans forward, her voice becoming taut.

“On the clean-up, did you see any of the Cyber technology?”

“M…ma’am?” It’s a tiny stutter, but it’s there and Jack notices his right fore-finger start to slide forward and back along the edge of the tray he’s holding flat against his thigh.

“The Cyber-tech – did you see any of it? Specifically, the weaponry,” Suzie says impatiently. “Did you see anything that was still working? Do you know how it functioned?” With each question, her voice gets more urgent. Ianto’s voice is flat, toneless.

“I’m sure with your expertise you know more about their offensive capacity than I would, Ms Costello.”

Suzie smiles from the teeth out, because Ianto’s accidentally hit a sore spot – they brought back two salvaged guns and she’s grasped the theory of how they work, but she’s not been able to get either of them to function.

“You’d think so, yes,” Suzie says. “So did you see anything?”

Ianto’s jaw tightens for a second and his throat moves as he swallows hard. It’s the second time this morning that Jack’s seen a strong reaction to the issue of the Cybermen. “I saw some weaponry, yes, Ms Costello. May I ask why…”

But Suzie is already coming to her feet, her smile taking on a savage overtone. “Wait.” She’s out of the Boardroom before any of them can say a word and Ianto looks over at Jack, one eyebrow raised. Jack shrugs in answer to the unspoken question.

“No idea what she’s up to.”

“How much do you remember of your work in the Linguistics Department, Ianto?” Tosh asks and there’s a clear note of hope in her voice. He gives her that polite smile again.

“Quite a large amount, Ms… Tosh. I have a good memory.”

Tosh’s eyes start to gleam and she opens her mouth but Owen cuts in.

“’Ere - how d’you know he’s not been sent by One, or that bleedin’ Committee they set up, to spy on us? How d’you know he’s not going to be feeding information back to someone?”

“Because there’s no-one left alive at One to authorise it,” Jack says. It’s only when he sees Ianto flinch that he realises he could have worded that a bit more sensitively.

He’s hated Torchwood One ever since he first ran up against the Institute. Back then, Torchwood Three was where London sent the ones too good to lose and too crazy to keep – like the pair of bitches that kept him on a leash. Back then, Torchwood Three was under London’s thumb and towed the London line and he hated everything about it. Hated hearing every new-comer told all that poison about the Doctor. Hated watching what Torchwood did to perfectly harmless creatures. Hated not being able to change anything because every time he tried, Alice simply authorised another round of “scientific studies” – either on the next alien, or on Jack himself. Her successors might not have known about his ‘problem’, but they were in the main as ruthless as she when it came to any living being that survived the trip through the Rift. So when Alex finally left him with all the authorisations and he managed to keep London’s hands off the Hub, he wanted nothing more to do with London no matter how many times Hartmann or her predecessors tried to send people to ‘help’. And when he heard what happened eight weeks ago, when he saw the destruction wrought across London and so many other cities and heard the initial reports of “no survivors”, he made his decision based on hatred and contempt and sent the women to Canary Wharf with strict instructions: ‘get the tech, don’t let UNIT or anyone else get their hands on anything useful’. He didn’t bother to spare a second’s thought for those who had worked there. When, a week later, the long list of the ‘missing’ arrived ( _…just a euphemism for ‘we can’t find a fucking body’…_ ) he scoured it for Rose’s name only and when the massive list of the dead came and her name was there, along with Mickey’s, he cried for hours – and deleted the unread email with the tiny list of survivors on it. _They brought it on themselves_ , he told himself. He’d had no pity for anyone else known to be killed (like Singh) or converted (like Hartmann). He’d had precious little for Hallet and the rest of the missing. And he didn’t even spare the survivors a thought. Until now. He doesn’t even know how many there are and that, now, makes him shift in his seat.

Owen draws a breath, and from the look on his face he’s about to spit more vitriol but then the door of the Boardroom slams open to admit Suzie. To Jack it’s a welcome distraction.

“Here, Jones – what do you make of this?” Suzie strides the length of the table, holding something bulky covered in a large sheet of packing-wrap. She dumps it on the table and yanks off the wrapping to reveal the huge gleaming Cybergun.

The clatter as the tray hits the floor has barely registered when there’s a rattling _thump_ as Ianto’s back hits the conference room wall. All colour has fled from his face and his eyes have gone so wide the cornea shows all around the iris, his panicked gaze fixed on the gun. His breath is coming in rasping heaves that are too short, as though he’s just taken a punch to the sternum and his lungs can’t inflate properly.

Whatever Owen was going to say is lost in a curse as he surges to his feet, three swift strides carrying him behind Jack to stand in front of Ianto. Coming to his own feet, Jack reaches them a second later; aware of Tosh pushing her chair back and turning to keep the three men in sight, her eyes full of concern; and of Suzie still standing beside the Cybergun, shock clear on her face. Owen moves in front of Ianto and takes a firm hold of his shoulders.

“Hey, Jones? Jones, mate, come on.” His voice has that familiar crisp ‘Dr Harper’ snap to it – this is him in his professional guise. He lifts one hand and snaps his fingers in front of Ianto’s face, but there is no reaction and Ianto’s gaze hasn’t moved.

“Can you hear me?” Owen continues, his tone firm but calm. “Hey, give me something here. C’mon, whats-your-name – oh yeah. C’mon Yan, look at me when I’m talking to you!”

Ianto’s reaction startles them all anew. His head snaps round and up so fast Jack wonders he doesn’t give himself whiplash. Even as his eyes meet Owen’s, he’s wrenching himself back out of the other’s hold, one hand coming up palm-out between himself and the doctor as though to fend Owen off for some reason. For one second, the horror in his eyes is replaced by sheer, stark fear. Then Ianto blinks, just once, lightning fast. And he’s back there with them, his face and eyes once again so calm as to be almost empty. His hand drops to his side, the fingers flexing once. He draws himself up to his full height, allowing him to look down at Owen.

“Ianto,” he says flatly.

“Eh?”

“Ianto, Dr Harper, if you don’t mind. Or Jones.” His voice is smooth again, as polite and emotionless as the smile that appears briefly. “Diminutives are hardly appropriate between strangers or in the workplace, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Owen raises his hands to shoulder-height, palms towards Ianto and the familiar look of exasperation comes over his face.

“Sorry, **Jones** \- couldn’t remember how to pronounce it.” For a second, he clearly wavers on the edge of returning to his offended status but whatever else he may be, Owen is a doctor first and foremost and now he glares at Ianto.

“What the hell was all that about? You bloody well freaked out on us.” The anger in his voice isn’t directed at Ianto, but it makes his voice snap nonetheless. Ianto’s head drops slightly and his shoulders lift a little. Both Jack and Owen wordlessly take a step back, giving him space but now Ianto can see the Cybergun again and he jerks his gaze away from it. Owen’s eyes widen briefly a second before Jack finally puts two-and-two together and he steps forward again, his face tense. When he speaks, though, his voice is calm.

“You didn’t just do clean-up, did you, mate? You fought in the Battle.”

There is a moment’s pause and then Ianto nods once without lifting his head.

"Yes," he whispers.

There is a moment of silence as everyone takes this in and Jack mentally kicks himself. Why he'd assumed Ianto had witnessed but not fought in the Battle he has no idea. _‘I saw what they did’_ – he’d said it himself. Yet Jack had unthinkingly assumed that Ianto, like most of the survivors, had (understandably) hidden away and only seen the aftermath. London always was very restrictive of job definitions – Field Officers didn’t do research and Researchers didn’t pick up weapons except to study them; but Ianto had six weeks in the field before his ‘unrequested no-fault’ transfer to Research. That means that whatever the reason for the transfer, Ianto hadn’t asked for it and nor had he fucked up in the field. With the Tower turning into a cybernetic Hell on Earth, Ianto most likely found himself pressed back into field service in an attempt to save lives. It occurs to Jack that DuPris’s name hadn’t been on either the ‘dead’ or the ‘missing’ list. He’ll have to request a second copy of the survivor’s list. And he’ll have to see if Ianto’s full file has survived, and if so take a look at exactly what was involved in Incident 456.89/TY.B05.

“What the fuck are you thinking of, Harkness?” The words are the same as they were ten minutes ago, but the anger beneath them is entirely different. This isn’t Owen angry with Jack about a presumed sexual escapade – it’s Dr Harper angry on behalf of someone who’s just become a patient.

“ **He** should bloody well still be on sick leave!” Owen says, jabbing a finger at Ianto and then shifts his glare from Jack to the other man. “What the bloody hell is anyone thinking of, okaying you for active duty again?”

“I was…” Ianto’s voice is a rasp and he stops for a moment, clearly trying to work enough moisture into his mouth to speak clearly. A small voice at the back of Jack’s mind points out that Ianto only brought four mugs of coffee into the Boardroom – there’s nothing for Ianto himself to drink. But Ianto lifts his head and speaks again and such vague awareness fades, as it will all too often in the months to come.

“I was never signed **off** -duty, Dr Harper. As I didn’t require hospitalisation, I was ordered back to work as soon as the civilian firefighters and UNIT attack teams were stood down.”

Now they are all four staring at him in varying levels of shock and disbelief.

“You’re telling me everyone not taken to Casualty was just expected to ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’?” Owen’s lip curls in disgust as he makes air-quotes around the old phrase. Ianto nods briefly.

“Priority One was clean-up,” he says.

“And Priority Two?” Jack asks softly. Ianto looks at him and his eyes are far too old for his face.

“Cover-up, sir.”

Jack curses inwardly. _Of course it fucking was._ There’s a soft noise from behind Suzie and Jack glances that way to see Tosh, one hand over her mouth and her eyes full of horror and guilt as she meets his gaze.

“I saw them,” she whispers, her voice muffled. “I saw them all, walking around like they were half-asleep. Through the ruins…” Her gaze flicks from his for a moment but he’s not sure whether she’s looking at Suzie, who saw the same thing, or Ianto, who might well have been one of those she saw. “We saw them. I didn’t think, I didn’t stop to ask what they were doing or if there was anything we could do, we just…. we got we wanted and we came home.” Her voice is so soft by the end he can hardly hear her. _When it burned, two of your people scavenged the ruins….._ Small wonder there was such bitterness in Ianto’s voice when he’d said those words. And Jack’s own response of only a day ago makes him cringe inside now. _You are not my responsibility…._ Yet even if his position in Torchwood didn’t give him that responsibility, shouldn’t simple humanity have meant that he at least asked what was being done for the survivors?

Beside him, Ianto shifts slightly and Jack turns his head in time to see Ianto look across at her. That polite smile is there once more. It doesn’t touch his eyes.

“I had my job to do, Ms Sato - you had yours. Please believe me – we didn’t expect any assistance from Cardiff.” Ianto’s toneless voice strips any ability to gauge his precise meaning. Does he mean ‘we didn’t expect you to be able to help, so don’t blame yourself?’ Or does he mean ‘we didn’t expect any common decency from Cardiff and you lived down to those expectations?’ The short, uncomfortable silence that follows makes Jack realise the others are probably wondering the same thing.

“And let me guess,” Owen says, his voice still sharp with anger. “After they forced you guys to clean up all the shit, they **didn’t** find you any psych help? Or medication?”

“Other than Retcon?” Ianto’s voice is suddenly, shockingly, raw and he doesn’t look at any of them his gaze instead aimed over Suzie’s shoulder, out into the Hub proper. Jack flinches and sees Owen swallow hard. Damn it, why did he forget how callous the Institute is? Why did he expect them to look after their own? _If you’re so much better, why did you delete the list of survivors?_ whispers the little voice that sounds like Rose.

Owen shakes his head and looks at Jack. “London might not have done their job, but I’m going to do mine.”

“Huh?” Jack says, at a loss.

“In my esteemed professional medical opinion, Jones here” he gestures at Ianto. “Ain’t fit for duty. You need to send him home.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen and Suzie object to the newest member of the team. Unfortunately for Ianto, they raise some good points....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to Crouching_Sunrose, my new beta, who was kind enough to read these two chapters over for you.

Ianto’s head jerks round towards them and for a moment his eyes are wild.

 _“Captain!”_ He says urgently. He’s white to the lips, what little colour he’s regained in the last few minutes drained away again. Jack briefly holds up one hand for silence and returns his attention to Owen.

“What, exactly, are you concerned about?” he asks. Owen’s eyes widen for a moment as though he can’t quite believe what he just heard.

“Concerned about? What about him spacing out on us in the middle of the field? What about him having a flashback and thinking **we’re** the Daleks, or the bloody Cybermen?” Jack’s still looking at Owen, but at the edge of his vision he sees Ianto flinch as though struck.

“What about the risk of him freezing in the middle of a fight with a Weevil and getting himself gutted?” Owen continues.

Jack hesitates. Quite frankly, he thinks Ianto coped just fine with the Weevil two nights ago and the ptero-whatever last night. Had Owen’s objections remained London and his presumption of Jack’s less-than-professional interests in Ianto, Jack would have ignored them. But with Owen now calling in his own role as team medic, he really has no choice but to listen. He hired Owen for his medical expertise after all, and to not hear him out is not only tantamount to insulting his professionalism (because although his attitude to his actual patients sucks, Owen is nothing but professional when it comes to the actual performance of his duties), but it’s also frankly foolish. You pay a man for his skills, you listen to his opinion when it concerns those skills. He sighs and nods.

“Tosh, Suzie – back to work,” Jack says. “Ianto – wait outside the office, please.”

“Sir,” Ianto says, a clear plea in his voice. Jack looks at him and Ianto falls silent, dropping his gaze to the floor. He swallows hard and Jack can see sudden lines of strain around his eyes. Tosh is already standing, but Suzie hasn’t moved.

“I’ll hear Owen out,” Jack says to Ianto, “and then I promise I’ll speak to you.” He flicks his eyes towards the door. “Go on, all of you. _”_ Tosh stands up and makes for the door but when Suzie stands up, it’s to plant both hands firmly on the table.

“Oh no, Jack. I want in on this - professionally.” Jack draws in a breath sharply, meaning to tell her to button it. Then he catches himself. If he’s listening to Dr Harper, he really has to listen to his own Second-in-Command as well. Irritated by being backed into a corner, he realises that Tosh is hesitating just inside the door and that Ianto has not moved.

“Tosh, Ianto – _now!”_ He uses The Captain voice, the one that Tosh will recognise as meaning he’s not prepared to listen to any more arguments and she almost snatches the door open. Ianto draws himself up into such a rigid pose that Jack half-expects him to snap off a salute, but he simply inclines his head sharply and follows Tosh from the room. As he goes, Jack notices Owen is watching him with a touch of what actually looks like sympathy.

Tosh has moved towards the stairs but as the door swings closed, Jack spots her turning back towards Ianto.

He turns to Owen. “You first. I can see you’ve got more to say.”

“Jack, speaking as a medic, that kid is traumatised. Which is hardly bloody surprising, being honest with you - Tosh said it looked like it’d been Hell on Earth!”

Suzie has sat back down and is leaning forward in her chair, arms braced on the table. As both men glance at her she looks up and nods.

“From what he just told us,” Owen goes on, “that fucking Committee that the Suits’ve set up has been more concerned with lying to the bleedin’ public than with bothering with the survivors. Which means the poor bastard genuinely has all my sympathy, given he wasn’t one of the higher-ups making all the decisions, but like I just said - I still don’t want him freaking out on us because the bloody Rift makes the wrong noise at the wrong time. And I sure as hell don’t want to be there if he freezes up in the fucking field and kills us all! He needs _time_ , Jack! Time to get his head together, time to come to terms with it, time to decide if he shouldn’t just walk away from Torchwood.”

“He handled himself pretty well when we were dealing with the pterodactyl,” Jack answers. “And when did I say he’d be going into the field anyway?”

Suzie gives a disgusted snort and Owen shakes his head, mouth thinning. “Come on! Even if you only take him on for the Hub, you know how crazy this job can be!” He jabs a finger in the direction of the table, where the Cybergun still sits. “Look at how he reacted to that! Christ, Jack, he near as damnit had a flashback just from looking at a fucking Cybergun! This ain’t exactly a stress-free working environment – even if he never goes in the field, I for one don’t want to be around if he snaps and starts going after his colleagues with a massive fucking knife!”

 _That_ hits closer – Millennium Eve is years gone but the memory of the look in Alex’s eyes makes him recollect the dark look in Ianto’s only an hour or so ago, when he was speaking of Cyber-converted colleagues. If Ianto really is on an emotional knife-edge, is it even fair to _him_ to keep him here? He’d denied any responsibility for Ianto only yesterday, but the other man became his responsibility when they started working together last night. Which means it’s Jack’s job to take into account what’s best for Ianto.

If Owen’s right, then keeping Ianto in Torchwood simply because he’s been having fun with the boy – and hopes to have more up-close-and-personal fun with him later – is pure selfishness. And possibly dangerous. As Owen says – even if Ianto stays out of the field, it’s not exactly a stress-free working environment here.

He inclines his head slightly to indicate he’s listened. “Anything else?”

“Aside from I’m almost certain your would-be boytoy is suffering from PTSD? Nah, Jack - not a bloody thing!” Owen throws himself back into the seat he left to deal with Ianto’s… flashback? Panic attack? He gestures to Suzie. “I think she might have something to say though!”

“Jack,” Suzie says, “I know you’re distracted by the new pretty…” Owen mutters _‘pretty!’_ with a snort of disbelief and Suzie throws him a glance. “Oh come on, Owen – who here is going to kick _that_ boy out of bed for leaving biscuit crumbs in the sheets?” Jack bites back his first comment and swallows a smile at the disgruntled look on Owen’s face. Owen only goes for men when he’s extremely drunk, and tends to deny it means anything. But then Suzie’s gaze comes back to Jack.

“As I said, you’re distracted by the new pretty but for Christ’s sake, Jack – why is he here?” She holds up a hand, palm-out. “I’m not asking ‘why did you hire him’ because that’s obvious.”

Jack opens his mouth to deny it but Suzie steam-rollers on.

“My question is - why is he _here?_ I mean, a Welsh survivor deciding to come back after the Battle, that’s fair enough. But I’m not buying the idea of a random ex-One employee just happening to be walking around Cardiff at the same time a pterodactyl popped through the Rift.” Jack opens his mouth and pauses, because … well, yes, he still needs to have a conversation with Ianto about that. He’d briefly wondered about it last night even before the other man admitted to possessing the Rift Activity Locator, but the whole ‘capturing a dinosaur’ thing had taken priority and before he’d had a chance to think about it again, Ianto had gone. Come to that, how did Ianto know to turn up in Bute Park the night before last?

Suzie seems to see that she’s getting somewhere because she continues, face intent.

“Owen has a point - how do we know he’s not a plant? How do we know he’s not going to be feeding information back to someone? I know you said there’s no-one left from One to approve that - but it doesn’t **have** to be anyone from One. It could be some Government hack sitting somewhere in Whitehall, or what about some UNIT spook?” Her expression grows grim.

The relationship between UNIT and Torchwood is fraught with tension and dislike (and not just because of their wildly differing views on the Doctor), and it’s true that UNIT would love to get eyes (and still better, hands) inside the Hub. The higher-ups at UNIT view Torchwood as power-hungry and arrogant, while their opposite numbers have always regarded UNIT with either suspicion for their ties outside the former Empire or with derision as ‘Johnny-come-latelies’. On the personal level…. Suzie and Owen both know the essence of Tosh’s reason for being here and while none of them are bosom buddies, they’ve all saved each other’s lives often enough for them to hate UNIT on her behalf. Jack meanwhile loathes UNIT not just for Tosh, but because despite his having travelled with the Doctor they have him down as _persona non grata_ due to his long-term association with Torchwood. He’d hoped, back in the 1970s and 80s, that he might be able to somehow leave the earlier versions of the Time Lord with something that would alert his later incarnation to Jack’s situation without actively damaging the time-lines. (A letter, marked ‘do not open before the Game Station and Lynda-with-a-y’? [He never thinks of Lynda without a stab of guilt and regret.] A message - if he could get inside the TARDIS could he get her to hide a message in her memory banks to be released only after she returns from 21st century London to the Game Station? _)_ But UNIT, in a dedication to the Doctor he can’t in all honesty fault them for, refused to let anyone even remotely associated with Torchwood within fifty miles of the Doctor. So he had to watch as first one, then two, then three and eventually four different incarnations of the man he needs, the man he’s been waiting more than 100 years for, worked with UNIT while remaining oblivious to Jack’s existence and ignorant of his questions. 

“UNIT could have turned him,” Suzie continues, and Owen nods. She carries on. “Even with them taking the heavy-duty calls and the London field work for now, we’ve all seen the increased workload since One went down. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for UNIT to think you might decide you needed more manpower and look to recruit from One’s survivors. You heard him just now – he doesn’t seem to think much of us, does he? Maybe it wouldn’t have taken much, right after the Battle, to get him to think that we’re partly to blame because we didn’t help on the day and all we did afterwards was pick over the ruins.” She shrugs. “And then they get him to agree to infiltrate us.”

_When it burned, two members of your team scavenged the ruins…. We didn’t expect any assistance from Cardiff._

Ianto certainly seems to have little positive feeling for Torchwood. Why should he? His girlfriend is dead, his previous employers seem to have had no interest in helping him and Jack’s attitude yesterday morning can hardly have endeared Cardiff to him even if he _didn’t_ blame them for any perceived failure to help during the Battle. Suzie has a point - why _is_ he so keen to return to Torchwood that he approached Jack again and again, ignoring even Jack’s clear threats? _Could_ it be UNIT? And yet….

“In that case,” he says slowly. “Why not send more than one person? And why would they send just a generalist? Why not send us a second medic or a technical specialist?” Not that he’d ever have taken a medic or tech from One of course – he’s read enough medic reports on aliens unfortunate enough to fall into London’s hands that he doesn’t want anyone like that within fifty miles of the Hub, and as far as he’s concerned he already has the best possible technician right here in the Hub – but UNIT aren’t to know that. Surely, if UNIT really did want to plant a mole in his base, they’d have chosen someone they’d think he wouldn’t be able to resist? After all, he might well have considered saying yes to a weapons specialist for example - _assuming any of them survived, of course._ Shit, he really needs to read that list of survivors. 

“Why?” Owen says with a sneer. “Probably because they knew that even though you spent months telling Hartmann you wouldn’t let any of her lackeys here to help, all they had to do was present you with a pretty face and you’d let your cock do your thinking for you!”

Months down the line, standing in a room stinking of blood and metal with Ianto’s wrenching sobs the only sound that break the horrified silence - Jack will look back and reflect on what might have been if Owen hadn’t said that. What might have been if Owen had taken another tack and Jack had let the man’s argument over-ride his own desires. What might have been if he’d Retconned Ianto and sent him to wherever the Committee deemed best. If he’d done that, surely Lisa Hallett’s body would have very shortly given up the fight. Certainly, she would never have entered the Hub - and so two people who died would have lived. Months down the line, standing in a room stinking of blood and metal and listening to Ianto’s wrenching sobs, Jack will wonder if things would not have been better that way.

Here and now though being (once again) called out on exactly what part of him was doing the thinking last night annoys him. He draws himself up to his full height (giving him a good few inches on both of them), folds his arms over his chest and lifts his chin to present a confident air - right before he lies through his teeth.

“And how much of this is based on your _assumptions_ about my motives for hiring him, hm?”

Owen snorts. “Please! You’re not seriously telling me that that guff about hiring him for doing the house-keeping and filing is on the up-and-up?”

Attack has always been Jack’s preferred form of defence. “You’re not seriously telling _me_ that a full-time dedicated support worker wouldn’t make things run smoother around here?” Before either of them can voice any more objections, he carries on.

“I’ve heard you both out. Owen, your opinion as a medic has value and I’ll take it into consideration. But Ianto came to me with a Torchwood problem last night, and he and I dealt with it. Very efficiently and promptly, as well. With no sign of any trauma on his part. If I decide to keep him on, I’m sure he’ll be equally efficient here, and make an invaluable contribution to the team.” He’s on firmer ground now because really, it’s quite true. He might have let his cock have the casting vote last night, but before that he had been relishing the way they’d been working together and beginning to reconsider the whole Jones issue.

Owen had started to frown as soon as Jack mentioned Ianto approaching him, and Jack realises he’s just revealed that their meeting wasn’t accidental. He hurries on.

“Suzie, I honestly don’t see UNIT trying to use a low-level Torchwood researcher as a way into the Hub, but I take your point. Whatever decision I make this morning, I’ll have Tosh do a deep-level search on both UNIT and Ianto. Make sure he’s clean and that they’re not trying anything.” When Owen looks mulish and Suzie opens her mouth, clearly intending to object, Jack shakes his head.

“Back to work, both of you. I’m taking your opinion on board, I’ll let you know my decision shortly.”

Owen throws up his hands, glares at Jack and stalks to the door. Suzie gives him a long look and then turns to follow him. Owen yanks the door open, glares at Ianto with searing contempt and storms away. Suzie stops in the doorway. She looks at Ianto and then at Jack.

“I really hope you’re not going to make a choice we’ll all live to regret, Jack.” She walks away.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ianto tries to justify staying on in Torchwood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Dulce et decorum est” is both a quote from, and the title of, one of the most famous anti-war poems of all time. It’s by Wilfred Owen, who died during WWI, and shows a chlorine (mustard) gas attack on a troop of (presumably) British soldiers - one of whom fails to get his mask on in time and thus chokes to death in front of his fellows. The poet tells the reader that if you could see what he has seen you would not tell your children “the old lie” – ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’. The phrase translates as “it is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country” and was, just before WWI, engraved on the wall of Sandhurst Military Academy, where British officers were and still are trained. Jack would certainly have been involved in WWI and cannot have missed knowing this poem. It’s also been taught to generation after generation of British school kids in English lessons. I think Ianto would certainly recognise both the quote, and that Jack is trying to imply that this ethos is Ianto’s motivation for staying with Torchwood.
> 
> Author's Note 2: With many thanks to my new beta Crouching_SunRose, who looked these two chapters over for me.

Jack watches Suzie descend the stairs stiff-backed and turns to his maybe-new-recruit.

“Come in, Ianto,” Jack says. “Close the door behind you.”

Ianto does so. Jack gestures to a seat but Ianto gives his head a slight shake and draws himself up to his full height. He stands at what’s almost a parade-ground rest - his arms slightly bent, hands clasped together behind him, gaze fixed ahead. The expression on his face is that of a man awaiting sentencing.

Jack chooses to sit, leaning forward, resting his elbows on the table and his chin on his clasped hands. There’s a moment of silence and then he speaks, trying to choose his words carefully.

“Dr Harper feels you may not be ready to cope with the stress of working here, after… your experiences at Canary Wharf.” Ianto’s gaze flicks to Jack and then back to just over his head. Jack carries on. “He thinks perhaps you should take more time to… adjust. I must admit, I’m a little concerned myself. Your reaction just now…”

“With respect, sir,” Ianto cuts in. Jack leans back, folding his arms over his chest. Not many people interrupt him, and this is the second time Ianto’s done it in their very short acquaintance. The kid has guts, he has to admit that.

“Eight weeks ago I was literally fighting for my life, and the lives of my colleagues, against two of the most murderous races in the galaxy. I saw people I worked with exterminated. Deleted. Co..” He breaks off and swallows audibly, then jerks his head at the gun still on the table. _Shit._ Jack hadn’t even realised it was still there, but Ianto carries on. His voice is tight.

“Those guns were the only thing those of us in the main tower could find to defend ourselves with, and as we had to take them off dead C..cybermen, we didn’t have many. And then in the middle of a staff meeting, Ms. Costello almost literally drops one into my lap. I believe a strong reaction is…. understandable.”

Jack can’t help but sympathise – he well remembers his own sickening fear of even the _idea_ of any Dalek showing up on the Game Station while he waited uselessly for the Doctor. If someone had suddenly thrown a Dalek gun at him mere weeks after his first resurrection, he’s not sure his reaction would have been any different to Ianto’s. Hell, it took him two years to be able to even _think_ the word ‘Dalek’ without breaking out into a cold sweat, so he can also sympathise with the way Ianto is struggling to say the word ‘Cyberman’. But the fact remains that Torchwood is no job for the vulnerable.

“If you stay here, I guarantee that Suzie will be doing more than simply showing you Cyberguns. She’ll want your opinion on every piece of Cybertech we took from the site, and we don’t have time to coddle your ‘understandable’ reactions.” That’s harsh, and he knows it, but it’s also true. He doesn’t have the time – or the resources – to take special care of vulnerable subordinates or to make special allowances for anyone.

A muscle jumps in Ianto’s jaw but when he speaks his voice has become calm, if a little cold. “I don’t require ‘coddling’ sir. I’m happy to give Ms. Costello, Ms. Sato, Doctor Harper or yourself as much information as I can about any tech recovered from the site. Had Ms. Costello simply asked me if I had any information on the Cyber weaponry, I would have been able to provide her with the little I know.” He meets Jack’s eyes and his seem greyer now than they did up in the office earlier. “The role we.. discussed last night and the role you outlined this morning is Hub-based, sir, and you seemed perfectly satisfied with my actions in the warehouse.” Jack’s not sure if there was a tiny pause before ‘satisfied’ or not, but Ianto is carrying straight on. “Do you think I’m incapable of coping with the role you’ve suggested - Captain?"

Jack hesitates. Alright, he’d stepped in to pull the Weevil off Ianto, but the younger man hadn’t seemed to be freezing up or panicking – he’d done quite well, given his only weapon was a tree branch. And both last night and this morning he’d handled the rapidly-changing situation well. So on the one hand – no, he doesn’t think Ianto incapable of providing the kind of support he outlined a few minutes ago.

But as Ianto himself has just said, it’s only eight weeks since Canary Wharf. Jack remembers only too well his war-time commands and having no option but to send traumatised, damaged soldiers back into battle time and again. There’s no actual pressing reason, other than Jack’s wish to retain Ianto’s quick wit and decided physical attractions, to return him to the high-pressure world of Torchwood. Is Owen right? Regardless of what Ianto seems to want, should he actually turn him away out of concern for the other’s state of mind?

“Why?” he says.

Ianto blinks. “Why what, sir?”

“Why did you keep coming back, Mr. Jones, even when I told you there was no job? Why have you been stalking me for the last two days?” Jack leans forward again, placing his forearms on the table. The lines of strain around Ianto’s eyes are suddenly back and his posture has become more rigid. Jack presses on, making his voice purposefully harsh.

“Why – and how - _do_ you have that Rift activity locator you mentioned last night? Where did that pterodactyl come from? Quite frankly - why do you want back in Torchwood, when eight weeks ago it killed your girlfriend?”

In the back of his mind, he hears a whispered voice that sounds suspiciously like his long-vanished Time Agency partner. _You always were good at being an unfeeling bastard,_ the voice says – and then it laughs like the man himself always used to.

Ianto moves forward and both hands slam down onto the table as he leans towards Jack. Heat flashes in his eyes and Jack realises that they’ve gone from grey to grey-blue. For a moment, he wonders what colour those eyes will go when Jack gets him into bed. _Focus, Jack!_

“Because I keep my promises!” Ianto snarls, with all of the passion that Jack heard yesterday morning outside the Tourist Office. He takes a long breath in, and his head drops for a moment. When he lifts it again to lock eyes with Jack, his voice is cool, calm. Each word is precise. “When I accepted a job with Torchwood, Captain, I took an oath. Torchwood One is gone, but I _keep my promises_.”

Jack feels cold suddenly. Oh, bloody hell - don’t tell him Suzie and Owen are right? Don’t tell him that he’s let his libido trick him into bringing London’s arrogance and “if it’s alien, it’s ours” attitude into his Hub?

“So…What?” Jack says, and the sneer in his voice is entirely deliberate. “I’m supposed to ignore my medic’s opinion and keep you on, just because you took an oath? You going to be talking about ‘fighting the good fight’ next? _Dulce et decorum est_?”

Ianto jerks back a step, straightening, a brief flash of anger on his face. “’The old lie’” he snaps and his eyes are a deep blue. “ **No,** Captain. Canary Wharf was not a _good fight_ , and nor were any of my field assignments.” He hesitates, and when he carries on his voice is careful, as though he’s thinking through every word.

“When I started with Torchwood, Hartmann was imposing a wholesale ‘re-organisation’ on the Field Department. That meant there was a recruitment freeze, but Team Seventeen was a man down and Rebecca DuPris was owed a few favours by some of her superiors. She called those favours in, and was allowed to recruit me directly into the field on condition that the team themselves were wholly responsible for my training.”

“I met her, once or twice.” Jack offers, intrigued. To call in enough favours to over-ride a policy instigated by Torchwood’s Director means DuPris must have been very impressed by Ianto’s potential. Perhaps, far from being the liability Owen fears, Ianto would be an asset in the field. “The last time was a few years ago. I think she’d just been made team leader. I liked her.” They’d met about three years after he’d taken over the Hub, at one of the rare inter-branch meetings he’d forced himself to attend. He’d also slept with her, but that wasn’t relevant. He’d found her cute, courageous, clever, cutting and capable. He’d offered her a transfer to the Hub, but she hadn’t been interested and so he’d gone out and recruited his own weapons specialist. He’d kept an eye on DuPris for the next year or so but eventually Hartmann had told him to stop trying to poach one of her top agents and he’d backed off so as to not interfere with DuPris’s career.

“Go on,” he says.

“I pretty much by-passed Orientation. I took the oath, I read the Charter but that was it. Other than that, I listened to my team-mates.” His hands have been at his side, the long fingers twitching and flicking at his trouser-seams. The left now comes to rest on his hip while the right runs through his hair before it pauses at the join of neck and shoulder. “Becca hand-picked us and trained us to work as a team. She was highly competent, and knew her business. She was also very clear in her opinion of the Charter. Archaic, outdated and short-sighted, in her own words.” He pauses, folding his arms, eyes fixed unseeingly on the table. “She disliked Hartmann, and she distrusted the “if it’s alien, it’s ours” mantra. She saw her duty as not only protecting the country from overt alien threats such as the Sycorax, but also as avoiding fatal misunderstandings with non-hostile aliens. She was adamantly opposed to Hartmann’s desire to build an extra-planetary replacement for the British Empire. She was worried that would just end up harming us.” He draws a deep breath, his gaze remote - whatever he’s looking at it, it’s a long way from here. “When I…. transferred to Research my new team-leader was horrified to find out I’d never completed Orientation. So he organised for me to go through with the latest batch of recruits head-hunted from university graduates.” His mouth tightens and he looks at Jack. His hands have shifted again, fingertips brushing the edge of the table.

“Orientation seemed to consist of having the Charter quoted at us until I could have recited it backwards. In Welsh. It was everything Becca had said it was, only now I was surrounded by people who thought it was wonderful, who lived and breathed it. I rapidly learned I was in a minority, and that it was best if I kept my head down and quietly tried to persuade people to change their view. I’d just met Li…” He swallows convulsively, one finger tapping the table-top for a moment, and pushes on. “So I stayed. And when London fell….” He looks at Jack. He draws himself back to his full height, his hands at his sides. His voice becomes matter-of-fact. “Despite the flaws in the Charter and Hartmann’s wrong-headed attitude, there genuinely _is_ an alien threat. I saw enough in the field to know that. There are also alien races who aren’t a threat at all - but right now humans aren’t ready to meet them – they’d only trigger yet more pointless international bickering. UNIT is often not the appropriate response. So, Torchwood.” He shrugs, almost helplessly, hands briefly spreading in a ‘what else?’ type gesture. “I made a promise, and the work is still there. I want to carry on keeping that promise.”

“Why not go for Retcon?” Jack asks. “You’d have forgotten what you saw. You’d have forgotten your promi...”

“I met her at Torchwood.” Ianto’s voice is soft, but his words stop Jack in his tracks. That resonates, because it’s one of the things that haunts Jack the most about his missing years. It’s not the missing adventures or the missing sex. It’s the fact that maybe there was ‘someone’, or several someones. Maybe he had a family. Maybe, as he woke partner-less in a fleapit spaceport next to a data-pad whose scrolling news-feed told him that two years had literally vanished in the blink of an eye… maybe somewhere else, ‘someone’ was waking up without him. Eight weeks ago, Ianto Jones had a job and colleagues and a lover. Then in one hellish day his life fell apart, and he was left with a choice – forget about the living hell he’d just walked out of, but lose his lover. Or keep his memories of her, and retain his memories of how it all ended. Sitting there, looking at him, Jack can’t justify forcibly taking that choice from him.

“Why not go the official route – put in a transfer request? Why the.. unorthodox approach?”

“The general consensus in London was that you were… an unknown factor. Potentially untrustworthy,” Ianto says, a note of hesitation in his voice. His hands have returned to flicking at the outer seam of his trousers. “The records I saw about your attitude to previous approaches from London that were clearly made with that opinion in mind gave me the distinct impression an official transfer request would be rejected out of hand.”

That’s fair enough. Even before Hartmann, all of the approaches London made since Millennium Eve have been with an attitude of trying to either force him into the fold or expose him as incompetent. Each time, he’s dealt with it by flirting non-stop while throwing them at everything the Rift can produce if it’s playing nice or (if the Rift is being uncooperative to his needs) dragging them through the most complex tech or most unpleasant autopsies Tosh or Owen can provide – all while keeping Suzie well out of their way (because he doesn’t think that anything good can come from One getting anywhere near the weapons). It worked perfectly each time, with the London personnel fleeing with their tails tucked firmly between their legs. Now he has Ianto Jones, who simply refused to take ‘no’ for an answer, does not seem the least bit bothered by Weevils or pterodactyls and (happily) seems ready, willing and able to flirt right back at him.

_Pterodactyl – yeah._

“So you decided to stalk me with a Rift activity locator until a pterodactyl just happened to fall out of the Rift right in front of you?”

Ianto flushes slightly, the pink touch along the high cheekbones making him even more attractive than before.

“When…” Ianto clears his throat. “While we were doing clean-up, they were already debriefing us. Getting everything they could from us.” His mouth twists and his next words are spat out, bitten off. “Making it clear they wanted us retconned, retired and written off.” The bitterness is strong enough to taste.

“I went into the Archives,” Ianto says. “And I took the activity locator and….”

“A one-hundred-percent-efficient transformer?” Jack asks, with a flash of inspiration. Tosh had been puzzled as to why the transformer had had virtually no meson energy, given it had seemingly just come through the Rift, but there’d been no time to look it into yesterday. It had been a niggling little indicator that something wasn’t quite as it looked – and Jack should have noticed that earlier.

The pink on Ianto’s cheeks deepens to red. He glances up from the table where his gaze has been fixed for the last few minutes and meets Jack’s eyes. There’s more grey in his eyes again. Those colour changes are fascinating, and Jack wonders again what colour they will go in Jack’s bed. _Focus!_

Ianto’s head tilts slightly in acknowledgement.

“I thought it might come in useful. The ladies only had a couple of days to… retrieve things, before they left. There was a lot of smaller tech left that wasn’t likely to be missed, and I thought it might…” He hesitates. His left hand is back on his hip.

“Sweeten the deal?” Jack asks, hiding the grin that’s fighting to get out.

Ianto runs his right hand over his hair and gives a terse nod. “Something like that,” he admits

“So how come the transformer is on Tosh’s desk and not with you?”

Ianto looks at him, teeth briefly worrying at his lower lip. He gives a faint shrug.

“Yesterday, after I spoke to you upstairs,” when Jack had ignored _what am I supposed to do with those memories;_ met his flat, pained _‘deceased’_ with an off-hand _sorry_ and then not only bluntly refused the job request, but rejected Ianto wholesale with _you are not my responsibility._ He flinches inwardly at the thought of what the Doctor would have said to all that, had he turned up at that moment. “After you left I…”

“Ah!” Jack says, and nods. “You detected the Rift alert.”

Ianto nods. “You appeared to be on your way somewhere, and I spotted Ms. Costello heading towards the Tourist Office. I decided to see what it was – to see if it was anything I could use to change your mind.”

Jack comes upright in his seat, folds his arms and stares at Ianto. He cocks his head a little and lifts an eyebrow interrogatively, knowing full well how intimidating the pose is even when he’s sitting down. Ianto stares straight at him, face calm and the earlier flush gone. His hands are quite still at his sides now, blue eyes calm.

“And what did you find?” Jack asks. He’s pretty sure of the answer, but it’s best to be sure.

“The pterodactyl.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

Ianto offers a small shrug. “More by luck than judgement, I found out it – she – has a taste for chocolate.” He looks at Jack and his lips curl in a brief, small smile. “I was running for cover and dropped it. So I managed to tempt her into the warehouse and locked her in. I realised someone from Torchwood would undoubtedly be out to check on the alert. I thought it was better if they found something, so I left the transformer for them. It was all I had on me.”

“Where did you have it?” Jack asks curiously. When Ianto had approached him, he’d surely not been hiding a transformer anywhere.

“It was in a lock-box on my bike.”

“Bike?” Jack asks blankly.

“A motorbike,” Ianto says, and there’s a trace of reluctance in his voice.

“You have a motorbike?” Jack says and this time he can’t hide the smile because the idea of _that_ body in close-fitting leather is…. appealing.

“Borrowed from a friend, sir,” Ianto says and the reluctance is replaced by the smallest hint of reproach.

“Ah – does this mean I can’t ask you to model the biking gear for me?” Jacks asks before he can stop himself. It’s Ianto’s turn to raise an eyebrow. His eyes are very blue now.

“Is that an on-the-clock request, sir?”

Jack laughs, but then decides he’d better make one thing very clear. “Never, Ianto.” He sobers. “Seriously, your job here will never depend on anything like that. Ask the others – Tosh ignores me, Suzie shuts me down every time with just a word, and Owen would knee me in the balls if I over-stepped the mark.”

“In that case, sir, I’ll have to remember your love-affair with coffee. In the meantime – what _does_ my job depend on, Captain?”

Jack’s yet again not entirely sure whether this is a deft rejection or a subtle come-on. Ianto’s manner during much of their interactions so far might imply the latter, but… Then his brain catches up with his libido and points out the second part of what Ianto said.

He draws a forefinger back and forth over his mouth, thinking. He has sympathy with Ianto’s desire to hold onto his memories of Lisa Hallett, and unless Ianto is an even better con-man than Jack ever was – and the idea of being out-conned by a 21st century Human is ludicrous – there’s no way he’s a plant from One. There does remain the real anger Jack saw in him yesterday, and the slim possibility that UNIT have made use of him to get at Jack and the Hub. In that case, rejecting him would actually mean UNIT would just try again. Tosh already has to spend part of each week fending off their inept hacking attempts – if Ianto really is a potential mole, then letting him and keeping a very close eye on him (Jack allows himself a brief moment to consider that idea from a very different perspective. It’s a very pleasant thought.) is surely the better move. After all, he can make sure Tosh keeps an eye on every phone call, every text, every email, even every key-stroke that Ianto carries out. Check every bank account he can possibly be linked to, and make sure he’s randomly shadowed over the city’s CCTV. That should alleviate Suzie’s concerns. And to alleviate Owen’s worries, he’ll keep Ianto’s duties strictly Hub-bound for now.

He nods, smiles and stands up. When he holds out his hand Ianto glances from it to his face, grey-blue eyes sharp with concern.

“Welcome to Torchwood, Ianto Jones.”

Which is when the Rift alarm goes off.

**Author's Note:**

> The earlier parts of this series were (slight) re-writes from 10 years ago, and had been very well beta'd at the time. This part was almost complete 10 years ago when my muse began to die in the aftermath of CoE. On returning to the fandom recently I found that the later copy of the file had eaten itself, although I had partial earlier copies. This section comes from that and has been re-written and re-written and re-written time after time for the last 3 months. I wanted this part finished and posted! If anyone wants to offer themselves as a beta for later bits, please feel free!


End file.
